Chris Scruggs seeks, learns and achieves with ‘Anthem’

“You’ve got to learn everything you know,” sings 26-year-old Chris Scruggs at the outset of his new Anthem album.

Scruggs is apt to learn, which aids the knowing. Raised by his mother, singer-songwriter-producer Gail Davies, Scruggs spent his youth around music and musicians, and he was never one to keep a question to himself.

At 17, he sought out steel guitar pioneer Johnny Sibert, who had played with Carl Smith, Jimmy Dickens and many others but who had long since quit the road and shelved his steel. Sibert was working as a security guard at The Tennessean nine years ago, when Scruggs found him and began asking for pointers and stories. Normally reluctant to talk much about music, Sibert opened up.

“I was a kid, and I guess there was nothing intimidating about me,” said Scruggs, who was looking to master a form of steel guitar playing that was largely set out to pasture in the 1950s, when steel players began using pedals and knee levers to manipulate sound.

“The steel guitar I really love was played by guys like Johnny Sibert and Jerry Byrd and Joaquin Murphey — guys that played without pedals, when it was more a melody instrument than a chordal instrument,” Scruggs said. “You can lose a little soul when the note is moved by a mechanism being pressed by your foot, versus that slow, soulful feel you get from slanting your bar up or back. I steal all of Johnny’s licks, but then he isn’t using them anymore.”
As a teen, Scruggs was transfixed by old-school country and honky-tonk music, and he may still be the world’s youngest Carl Smith expert. In his 20s, though, his efforts at replication fell away in favor of a more expansive musical vision. Music now billed as “traditional” — from Ray Price’s country shuffle to Chris' grandfather Earl Scruggs’ patented style of banjo playing — was once revolutionary. Tradition’s roots are invention.

“You have to play your own music, and sing in your own voice,” Chris Scruggs said. That doesn’t mean dropping the Sibert licks, it means incorporating them into a soundscape that encompasses rock, pop, swing and R&B. The Washington Post’s Buzz McClain name-checked John Lennon, western swing trailblazer Milton Brown and minimalist rock ensemble the White Stripes in seeking to describe Scruggs, and his pointed, atypical lyrics assure that Anthem won’t be taken merely as highly evolved assemblage art.

After a couple of years spent as Chuck Mead’s guitar-wielding foil in BR549, Scruggs moved from Nashville to Texas, and he recorded Anthem at Wavelab Studio in Tucson, Ariz.

“I was living in the Texas hill country, and it was 13 and a half hours from there to Nashville, and 13 and a half hours from there to Tucson,” he said. “I figured I’d follow the setting sun and see what that sounded like.”

It sounded like Anthem, an album that works fine in shuffle mode but finer as a whole, where its songs meld into a loose storyline in which fretfulness and loneliness are overcome by a cautious redemption. Anthem is a synthesis of the things Scruggs knows — the things he’s learned — one-quarter century into his planet ride. And he’s bent on learning more still.

“I’ve been going over to (Nashville session great) Buddy Spicher’s place once a week for the past few months, trying to learn as much as I can about the fiddle,” he said. “I’ve graduated from being a non-fiddler to being a bad fiddler, which is a huge leap. And I’m slowly trudging my way toward being just a fiddler.”

IF YOU GO

What: Chris Scruggs album release party for AnthemWhen: 6 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 1Where:Grimey’s (1604 8th Ave. S., 254-4801)Tickets: No charge, open to the public